Mirlande Wilson, a Haitian immigrant, said she purchased a Mega Millions ticket, worth $105 million, with her own money separately from her co-workers' pool at a McDonald's in Milford Mill, Maryland.
Her co-workers claim they each contributed $5, before sending her out to buy tickets for the group a few hours before Friday's nationwide Mega Millions draw.
CCTV footage, from a nearby 7-Eleven grocery store at 7:15 p.m., shows that the winning ticket was purchased around the time Wilson went to the shop.
In a phone call to the restaurant, shortly after the numbers were announced at 11 p.m., Wilson is said to have shouted: "I won, I won."
Wilson's co-workers, who make around $7 an hour, noticed that she did not say "we won," and were immediately suspicious.
Wilson told the New York Post that she had the winning ticket in a safe place and would not be sharing her prize money with her former friends at McDonald's: "I was in the group, but this was separate. The winning ticket was a separate ticket."
The mom of seven later started to backtrack after being visited at her home by angry co-workers: "I don’t know if I won. Some of the numbers were familiar. I recognized some of them. I don’t know why people are saying differently. I’m going to go to the lottery office today. I bought some tickets separately."
Mirlande Wilson:
The article said it was only a few hours before the drawing she probably got them after work on the way home. So no time to share what numbers were the groups. In any case, unless she can prove beyond any doubt that the ticket was bought by her for her (like it was bought the day before she bought the group tickets) then courts have ruled in similar cases that the money must be shared.
Oh, I wonder if she might pay back the state for all the food stamps and other aid she certainly received after arriving here.
Dude. Please make a reasonable statement next time.
How do you know that? I'll need it for the next lotto.
This woman better hire someone competent to advice her. And move into a much better neighborhood, otherwise she will be robbed if not murdered in the next several months.
advise not advice
Thanks professor
Isn't there some precedent over whether this kind of situation is legally actionable? I know I've heard of this happening before. Needless to say, she is almost certainly lying unless she handed over the other tickets BEFORE the drawing. If she kept them all only to say "Oh, no, THIS one is my own" then she's a lying sack of crap.
If you have such a system. You need to have rules. Are all the tickets in a pile in a safe place? Did she buy and distibute the tickets to each of the others? Any kind of a receipt to show how many tickets she bought? At least there should be a photo copy of all tickets held to prevent this. Fellow workers probably can't prove she did not buy an extra at the same time without a receipt. But then..which ticket won? Problems..
The area that I live in has a rather large (and annoyingly arrogant) Haitian immigrant community and none of the woman's actions in this surprise me in the least.
The ones that I have come across, for the largest part, assume that whatever they do, they are entitled to get away with and everyone else is inferior to them.
It might go a long way to explaining why the last stable government the island had was under French rule.
Those who surrender essential liberties for temporary security deserve neither and lose both. - Benjamin Franklin
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